USER

I'm a writer, editor, marketer and publisher who is the author of 14 books about disability awareness and disability employment.

Every week subscribers to my interactive newsletter, “Opening Up,” receive by email a short story (fiction but based on my real-life experience).

Each new story is about a senior who uses hindsight and foresight to offer a takeaway tip and a discussion question that can guide members of our community toward a new understanding about how to handle age-related limitations.

See https://openingup.substack.com/archive for the past 60 weekly issues of “Opening Up” and three introductory articles.

“Opening Up” is where ageism meets ableism in an uplifting, mutual-mentoring community.

I'm also the founder of cerebral-palsy-career-builders.com, the comprehensive career coaching guide for parents of youngsters with cerebral palsy who are 7 to 27 years old.

I own Hasse Communication Counseling, LLC, which provides champions of disability employment with Creative Commons content which they can freely and legally use, share and repurpose for non-commercial purposes only.

See https://www.linkedin.com/in/vulnerability/ for my "Rich, AI-free Content to Serve your Community."

I've been an accredited Global Career Developmental Facilitator since 2005.

My central premise as a career development facilitator is this: Disability, when framed with insight, can be a competitive advantage in today's job market for job seekers with special needs.

A 1965 honors graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Journalism, I am one of the few individuals with a disability (cerebral palsy) worldwide to earn the credentials of Accredited Business Communicator (ABC) by the International Association of Business Communicators, San Francisco, Calif.

I developed an award-winning corporate communication function for Foremost Farms USA, Madison, Wisconsin, during my service of 29 years at the cooperative -- 10 of which were at the vice presidential level for the Fortune 500 company.

I decided to retire from Foremost Farms USA in 1994 and start my own business for helping college students with disabilities prepare for the mainstream job market.

Between 1997 and 2001 (before blogging became commonplace), I wrote "Break Out: Finding Freedom When You Don't Quite Fit The Mold," a paperback memoir of 51 short stories about disability awareness, and used that material to develop tell-us-your-story.com, a now discontinued website where people with disabilities shared their personal-experience stories.

That first book and website helped me land a full-time telecommuting job with The Associated Blind, Inc., New York City, as senior content developer for eSight Careers Network.

Between 1999 and 2009, I was responsible for all the online content of eSight Careers Network. I wrote, assigned and edited more than 1,300 articles about disability employment issues.

That helped me get the attention of AMACOM, the publishing arm of the American Management Association in New York City. I compiled and edited "Perfectly Able: How to Attract and Hire Talented People with Disabilities," a disability recruitment guidebook published in 2011 by the American Management Association for hiring managers that highlights disability's competitive advantage in today's job market.

See all of my books on Amazon.